Taking a ride in Nvidia’s self-driving car

Sitting in the passenger seat of a car
affectionately known at Nvidia as "BB8" is an oddly terrifying
experience. Between me and the driver's seat is a centre panel covered
in touchscreens detailing readings from the numerous cameras and sensors
placed around the car. There's also a large red button helpfully
labelled "stop."

As BB8 pulls away to take me on a short ride
around a dedicated test track on the north side of the Las Vegas
convention centre—with no-one in the driver's seat, mind you—it's hard
to resist keeping a hand hovering over that big red button. After all,
it's not every day that you consciously put your life in the hands of a
computer.

The steering wheel jerks and turns as BB8
sweeps around a corner at a cool 10 miles per hour, neatly avoiding a
set of traffic cones while remaining within the freshly painted white
lines of the makeshift circuit. After three smooth laps, two Nvidia
employees wheel out an obstacle—a large orange panel—into the middle of
track, which BB8 deftly avoids.

Aside from a remote kill switch held by a
chaperone on the outside of the track, BB8 isn't being controlled by a
remote, nor has it been pre-programmed with the layout of the track. It
is a fully realised, near-fully automated self-driving car that works
today. And as unnerving and as foreign as it is to be driven around in
BB8, there's no doubt in my mind that this is the future of driving—and
it's coming far sooner than you might think.

By 2020 (a "hard deadline" I'm told), Nvidia
plans to release an almost entirely automated, self-driving car that
anyone can buy. This "Level 4" automatic vehicle—where the AI can
control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe
weather—will be built in conjunction with automotive legend Audi, and it
will be powered by Nvidia's PX2 board. The latter combines Pascal-powered GPUs
with custom ARM chips to analyse signals, objects, pedestrians, signs,
or whatever else it is a car needs to know in order to navigate our
roads.

Plugged into BB8 are cameras that give it a
full 360-degree view of the road, along with numerous light detection
and ranging sensors (lidar) that constantly construct a highly accurate
3D model of the environment as the car drives around. These sensors,
combined with Nvidia's own AI algorithms, enabled it to teach a
prototype of the upcoming Audi car (also on display at CES) to learn to
drive in just four days.

And yes, the Audi car was just as adept as navigating the CES test track as BB8.

While a fully automated self-driving car is
extremely impressive, not all car makers are going down the same route.
Some are opting to instead create partially autonomous cars. These can
take over driving duties at key points—for example, when on a long
stretch of highway—and then hand back control to the driver with a
warning message and a one-minute countdown.

"We feel that AI will be running the car all
the time," Danny Shapiro, senior director of automotive at Nvidia, told
me. "It might be in some places the AI will take over, because it has a
high confidence. In other places, it wouldn't. When you input a
destination, the car knows whether it has those roads mapped and whether
it has the confidence to tackle them. Maybe there are some crazy
roundabouts and you need to handle them. The AI will always be running,
it's up to the auto-maker to figure out where to activate it."

The test track at CES might have been small, but it made the tech no less impressive.

There's also the option of not using AI to
drive the car directly at all. AI co-pilot, shown here for the first
time at CES, places sensors on the inside
of the car as well as the outside, using them to detect whether the
driver is getting sleepy, or whether there are too many pedestrians on
the road and the car should be slowed down.

Ethical dilemmas will be eliminated with technology

It's clear that all cars will eventually
feature some sort of autonomous driving mode or AI co-pilot. And while
CES made it feel like this technology is just around the corner, some
onlookers are doubtful: "We are not even close," CEO of the Toyota
Research Institute Gill Pratt said during his CES keynote yesterday.
There are certainly still issues to overcome: what does a self-driving
car do when faced with a life or death decision between its passengers
and a pedestrian? And who is responsible, the car or programmer?

"There's really no way to program ethics,"
says Nvidia's Shapiro. "90 percent plus of accidents are caused by human
error, either by bad perception, inattention, whatever else. Right off
the bat we have full 360-degree awareness and the the full undivided
attention of these sensors. Ethical dilemmas come up 90 percent of the
time because a person wasn't paying attention. We believe all of these
ethical dilemmas will be eliminated with technology."

"If you think about it," Shapiro continues,
"there's no way to prevent someone running a red light, or a pedestrian
running out in front of you. And so there are still accidents that are
unavoidable. No human could possibly stop the car in time. Expecting a
computer to drive better than a human is a given, we will do that. But
expecting a computer to prevent 100 percent of the accidents caused by
human error isn't a reality until every car is autonomous."

Watch BB8 in action.

Accidents have already happened. In May of 2016, a driver died while cruising using Tesla's Autopilot function.
While not a fully automated driving system (it's a driving aid), media
were quick to point out the pitfalls of computers being given control of
a vehicle.

"That day, one person died," says Shapiro. "In
the US, 99 other people died in human-driven cars that day. Since then,
100 people die every day in human driven cars. Yes, media makes a big
deal out of it. In this case, this wasn't a self-driving car, this was
someone who was taking a driver assistance system and not using it
properly. I'm not trying to defend it, and I'm sure there will be other
accidents, but as a society, we have to think about the general good."

"Think about if a doctor came up with a cure
for cancer," Shapiro continued. "99 percent of the time people took that
drug cancer was cured. But one percent of the time it's gonna have a
fatal side effect. As a society would we say, 'let's put that drug out
there' or 'no, it's not 100 percent we're not gonna do it?' We have to
look at what's happening today and look at how much better as a society
we will be with this technology in place."

With the likes of Google, Uber, Toyota, and
even Apple all working on self-driving cars, it's unlikely any
accident—bar something truly catastrophic—will derail the march of
progress. Having now experienced the future first hand, the tech can't
come fast enough.